Skip to main content

Term 2 Book Review

The most interesting book I read in term two was a book called Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, which was basically six loosely related stories set in different time periods. Basically the book is told like a Russian nesting doll where five of the story are left hanging halfway at a cliffhanger, then the six story is told in full and then the other five stories are continued in reverse order they were told in, so 1,2,3,4,5,6,5,4,3,2,1. Each story has some kind of trace (for example a document or statue) that came from the previous story.
The first story is called The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing which is about some kind of lawyer who is at sea. The story begins in 1850 in the Chatham Islands. He finds a Moriori stowaway in his cabin while travelling and also catches a parasite.
The second story is called Letters from Zedelghem. Told in form of letters from a musician to their lover Rufus Sixsmith in 1931. They are hired to become an Amanuensis for a famous composer Vyvyan Ayrs (which is someone employed to write or copy what someone else says, so in this case to copy down the composition from Ayrs) who is dying from syphilis and cannot see.
The third story is called Half Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery. It is set in 1975 California and is written like a thriller/mystery novel. Luisa Rey, a journalist meets Rufus Sixsmith in a stalled elevator and he discusses his concern that a Nuclear Plant is not safe.
The fourth story is called The Ghastly Ordeal Of Timothy Cavendish, which is written in more of a comedic tone and set in modern day London. where Timothy Cavendish, a 65-year-old publisher, flees the brothers of his gangster client, whose book is experiencing high sales after the murder of a book critic. They threaten him if he doesn't give them the money they were promised. Timothy's brother books him into a menacing nursing home and Timothy signs custody papers thinking that he is registering into a hotel, where he can stay until his personal and financial problems can be solved.
The fifth story is called An Orison of Sonmi~451, set in a dystopian Corporate driven Korea. It's told through an interview through a fabricant waitress named Sonmi~451 and an Archivist after her arrest. Clones grown in vats are the predominate source of cheap labor.
The sixth story is called Sloosha's Crossin' an' Ev'rythin' After. An old man named Zachry, tells a story from his youth in an imagined English dialect. It is set in Big Island in Hawaii in the post apocalyptic far future after "the fall of civilization" which sent technology into primitivism. His people, called "The Valley Folk" are occasionally invaded by the cannibalistic "Kona" tribe and worship a goddess Sonmi. Big Island is occasionally visited and studied by a technologically sophisticated people known as the Prescients, whereof a woman called Meronym, who has come to learn their ways, is assigned to live with Zachry's family.
Although my synopsis of the stories make the book sound incredibly boring, I genuinely love this book and think it is an amazing book because it is very unique and interesting.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Excellence Care Values 10

On Friday in the middle block we usually have something where we do things, like there is a buddy programme and then there is a gardening programme, but the one I am in is Gamification, where you basically code and create a mini game. We started off at the start of the term using a programme called GameFroot, but it didn't really work well so instead we used scratch, which I found much easier. Mr Ladbrook now gives a series of challenges which we had to compete for and if we won we would win a prize. Last week we had to make a pong game and this week we had to make a platformer. Most people used Gamefroot for this but Jacob, Noah, Jak and I used scratch to try and do it. Mine had a landscape and clouds everywhere that moved side to side while they tried to get as high as you could. It half worked but the character could jump infinitely and it was very weird. The leadership quality I used was resilience because at the start I didn't really understand how the variables tab worked

Excellence Care Values 9

Two weeks ago at technology we had Textiles and Design, in the session half of the class was away since they were at South West Zones so it was very quiet. When we first got there we watched a video about how life and technology was changing society and changing the amount of jobs in the world and Mrs Paterson asked us how we felt about that. The she gave us a competition to see who could thread the sewing machine the fastest. Jacob and I came fourth in that since we threaded the whole machine instead of just the thread and not the bobbin. Then since I wasn't feeling like doing my project since I wasn't really getting that much done I decided to just paint on denim. My painting started off with a mountain and a ski lodge at the top with a ski lift carrying everyone up. But then they ran out of white paint so I couldn't paint anymore mountains. The leadership value I showed and the care value I showed was Active Thinking since I instead tried painting on denim to take a brea

Excellence HLC C6

For the Home learning challenge C6 Give to families in need: Find a way to help those in need (food or clothes collection for Salvation Army etc) my Mother and I went to the salvation army and donated clothing and shoes to them.